One of the silly, fun cadeaux I brought back from the States for the Little Guy was a rubber tree frog from the Central Park Zoo in NYC. This was no ordinary rubber grenouille, though... not only was he pink and yellow, like an exotic species from the Zoo's rain forest exhibit, but THIS frog was designed to expand to more than THREE TIMES its normal size if you soaked it in water. Which I thought sounded totally cool and figured a 7-year-old would think so, too. Not wanting the little boy next door to feel left out, I also bought one for him.
On the first day the boys were back together after vacances, I gave them their frogs. Excitement ensued. We put them in some cold water per instructions, and waited for the miracle transformation. How big would it really get? Would it be like a "B" horror movie, "The Frog that Ate Paris"? We had no idea what to expect. So we waited. And waited. And waited some more. After an hour, still nothing, other than the frog's skin starting to feel almost realistically slimy. Georges then took a closer look at the packaging and discovered that hidden underneath the price sticker, there was a little mention of the alleged expansion taking three to seven DAYS in total. DAYS! Not minutes or even hours! Quel rip-off!
Frustrated that my $4.95 investment hadn't produced more immediate results, under my breath (and out of hearing range of the Little Guy) I muttered something in my best Franglish: "Damn frigging grenouille".
And Georges, his older son and his daughter all looked at me all like I had a tree frog sitting on my head, and they're all, WHAT did you say? Not because of the profanity -- but because of how I pronounced the French word for "frog". A word, by the way, I learned in my first year of French class in 1975, and I've been pronouncing it the same way ever since:
Gren-you-EE
I then had to endure about ten minutes of them trying to teach me the RIGHT way to say it. Because of course [sigh] I was saying it WRONG. (If I had a euro for every time someone has corrected my French in the past two years...) Georges says it's prounounced as if you said "Gren-New-York" but left off the -ork part, sort of like this:
Gre-NOU-ye
But even THAT doesn't adequately describe the bizarre pronunciation that is not only foreign to my ears, but to my American mouth, throat and vocal cords which are unused to forming such a sound. While working on this blog post, I even double checked with Georges to see if I had gotten the correct pronunciation FINALLY and of course I hadn't. After 15 minutes of him trying to coach me on it (Lord, that man is patient!) I'm still not 100% sure I've got it, although the Little Guy seemed pleased by my last attempt.
So I said to Georges, "I'm so proud that I can pronounce words like 'fauteuil' (which is not the same sound as grenouille but is equally hard for English-speakers to conquer) so well -- THAT'S not easy for a native English-speaker either", and he agreed I do say that one perfectly. Then I said, "But are there OTHER words in French that use that same sound as grenouille? Because I don't know of any."
It was then that he dreamed up the following French tongue-twister to help me practice.
Je fouille le fauteuil pour les couilles de la grenouille.*
I'll never look at a frog the same way again.
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* Translation: I search in the chair for the frog testicles.
Oh, and in case you wondered, that damned rubber frog finally DID expand to three or four times it's normal size by about the third or fourth day.
